“This is the most dangerous of all the front lines,” said Oleksandr, head of a medical unit of the Ukrainian army’s 25th Brigade.
We are in the treatment room of a cramped, makeshift field unit – the first point of treatment for wounded soldiers.
“The Russian Federation is pushing very hard. We have failed to stabilize the front. Every time the front line moves, we move too.”
We are close to Pokrovsk, a small mining town about 60 km northwest of the regional capital Donetsk.
The medics tell us that they recently treated fifty soldiers in one day – numbers rarely seen before in the course of this war. The victims are brought to this secret location for treatment after sunset, when they are less likely to be attacked by armed Russian drones.
Ukrainian troops have been injured during the fierce battle to defend Pokrovsk. Just a few months ago this was considered a relatively safe place; About 60,000 people lived there and the streets were full of restaurants, cafes and markets. Often soldiers from the front lines came to town for a break.
Now it feels like a ghost town. More than three-quarters of the population has left.
Since Russia captured the city of Avdiivka in February, the advance in the Donestk region has been rapid. In early October it captured the main city of Vuhledar.
The Ukrainian government agrees with the soldiers we meet on the ground that the fighting around Pokrovsk is the most intense.
“The Pokrovsk direction leads the number of enemy attacks,” Kiev declared this week – claiming that Ukraine’s armed forces had repelled a total of around 150 “enemy” attacks on most days of the past two weeks.
In the field unit, ten kilometers from the front, army doctor Tania holds the arm of Serhii, a soldier with a bloody bandage covering most of his face, and guides him to an examination room.
“His condition is serious,” says Tania.
Serhii has shrapnel damage to one of his eyes, his skull and brain. The doctors quickly clean his wounds and inject antibiotics.
Shortly afterwards, five more soldiers arrive – unsure how they received their injuries. The barrage of fire can be so intense and sudden that their wounds could have been caused by mortars or explosives dropped by drones.
‘It’s dangerous here. It’s hard, mentally and physically. We are all tired, but we will make it,” said Yuriy, the commander of all the brigade’s medical units.
All the soldiers we see were wounded at different times of the morning, but they didn’t arrive until after nightfall, when it is safer.
Such delays could increase the risk of death and disability, we are told.
Another soldier, Taras, has a tourniquet tied around his arm to stop bleeding from a shrapnel wound, but now – more than ten hours later – his arm looks swollen and pale and he cannot feel it. A doctor tells us it may need to be amputated.
Two soldiers have been brought in dead in the past 24 hours.
What we see in the field unit points to the ferocity of the battle for Pokrovsk – a major transportation hub. The rail link running through it was regularly used to evacuate civilians from frontline towns to safer parts of Ukraine, and to transport supplies for the army.
Ukraine knows what is at stake.
The threat of Russian drones is ever-present: one hangs just outside the medical unit while we are there. It makes evacuations from the front lines extremely difficult. The windows of the building are boarded up so that the drones cannot see inside. But as soon as someone steps out the door, they are at risk of being hit.
The drones also pose a threat to the remaining citizens of Pokrovsk.
“We hear them buzzing all the time – they stop and look through the windows,” says Viktoriia Vasylevska, 50, one of the remaining war-weary residents. But even she has now agreed to be evacuated from her home, on the city’s particularly dangerous eastern edge.
She is surprised by how quickly the front line has moved west towards Pokrovsk.
“It all happened so quickly. Who knows what will happen here. I’m losing my nerve. I have panic attacks. I fear the nights.”
Viktoriia says she barely has any money and will have to start her life again somewhere else, but it’s too scary to stay here now.
‘I want the war to end. Negotiations must take place. In any case, there is nothing left in the lands occupied by Russia. Everything has been destroyed and all the people have fled,” she says.
We notice that morale has been damaged among most people we speak to: the toll of more than two and a half years of a heavy war.
Most of Pokrovsk is now without power and water.
At a school there is a line of people with empty jerry cans waiting to use the communal tap. They tell us that a few days ago four cranes were working, but now there is only one.
As you drive through the streets, destruction is visible, but the city has not yet been bombed like other cities that have been heavily fought over.
We meet Larysa, 69, who is buying bags of potatoes from one of the few food stalls still open in the otherwise closed central market.
‘I’m terrified. I can’t live without tranquilizers,” she says. With her small pension, she doesn’t think she could pay the rent anywhere else. ‘The government can take me somewhere and shelter me for a while. But what next?”
Another shopper, 77-year-old Raisa, intervenes. “You can’t go anywhere without money. So we just sit in our house and hope this will end.”
Larysa thinks it is time to negotiate with Russia – a feeling that may have been unthinkable to most people in Ukraine some time ago. But at least here, near the front lines, we found many expressing it.
“So many of our guys die, so many get hurt. They sacrifice their lives, and this goes on and on,” she said.
From a mattress on the floor of an evacuation van, 80-year-old Nadiia has no sympathy for the advancing Russian forces. “Damn this war! I’m dying,” she wails. “Why does (President) Putin want more land? Doesn’t he have enough? He killed so many people.”
Nadiia cannot walk. She dragged herself around her house, depending on the neighbors’ help. Only a handful of them remain, but under the constant threat of bombing she has decided to leave, even though she does not know where she will go.
But there are people who have not yet left the city.
Among them are local residents working to restore war-damaged infrastructure.
“I live in one of the streets closest to the front line. Everything around my house burned down. My neighbors died after their house was shelled,” says Vitaliy, as he and his colleagues try to repair electrical lines.
“But I don’t think it’s right to abandon our men. We must fight until we achieve victory and Russia is punished for its crimes.”
His determination is not shared by twenty-year-old Roman, who we meet while he is busy repairing a shell-damaged house.
‘I don’t think the area we are fighting for is worth human lives. Many of our soldiers have died. Young men who could have had a future, women and children. But they had to go to the front line.”
One morning at sunrise we drive to the battlefield outside the city. Fields of dried sunflowers line the roads. There is hardly any cover, so we drive around at breakneck speed to protect ourselves against Russian drone attacks.
We hear loud explosions as we approach the front line.
At a Ukrainian artillery position, Vadym fires a Soviet-era artillery cannon. It makes a deafening noise and blows dust and dried leaves from the ground. He flees to take shelter in an underground bunker, safe from Russian retaliation and waiting for the coordinates of the next Ukrainian attack.
“They (Russia) have more manpower and weapons. And they send their men into the battlefield as if they were cannon fodder,” he says.
But he knows that if Pokrovsk falls, it could open a gateway to the Dnipro region – just 20 miles (32 km) from Pokrovsk – and their task will become even more difficult.
“Yes, we are tired – and many of our men have died and been wounded – but we must fight, otherwise the outcome will be catastrophic.”
Additional reporting by Imogen Anderson, Anastasiia Levchenko, Volodymyr Lozhko, Sanjay Ganguly
